Philippians Series Pt. 9 - Pastor Greg Addison - November 3, 2024

Ministering to the heart of Western Arkansas's River Valley for over 165 years, welcome to Chapter and First, the Bible teaching ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church.

You'll find sermons and teachings from Pastor Greg, our ministry staff, and guest speakers.

Thank you for listening.

Turn with me in your Bibles, if you will, to Philippians chapter 3, and we're going to continue our study here.

Philippians 3 · chapter mention

I love this chapter in Scripture.

This is an incredibly powerful passage of Scripture.

It's incredibly powerful verses that are in here.

And really, we could spend weeks and weeks and weeks on chapter 3.

Just an incredible amount of stuff here.

But what we're trying to do is work our way through this gospel to give you the whole.

So what I want to do is grab something really important, I think, that is often not thought about in this particular passage.

Paul says a lot of powerful things here.

But there are some things he says that are hard, and that's one reason I think we skip over them.

And there's an interesting statement that he makes in here that we're going to highlight today.

And here's why.

Because all of us have times in life that are difficult.

And so I want to talk to you about today is how knowing Jesus sustains us during troubled times.

During troubled times.

And I want you to see in this passage, if you don't hit this verse and this statement that Paul says that is arresting for us.

Here, as we lead up in chapter three a couple of weeks ago, we talked about how the definition of a Christian is defined here in this passage of Scripture.

It is those who boast in Christ Jesus, who worship by the Spirit of God, and who do not put confidence in their flesh.

And then he talks about if there's anybody who could have bragged on their spiritual strength, that's him.

Then he goes on to talk about that a little bit and unpack it.

But here's what he then follows up with after that statement.

After saying, this is what a real believer looks like, here's what he says in verse 7.

But everything that was a gain to me I have considered to be a loss because of Christ.

More than that, I also consider everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.

Now, there's a lot of folks who love Jesus.

Right?

I mean, most of the time, folks in church, you love Jesus.

That's why you're in church or involved or whatever.

We love Jesus.

And we do love Jesus.

And I think that's a very honest thing.

We have that.

We love Jesus.

But do we really know Jesus?

Do we really put a value on what it means to know Jesus intimately in a personal way?

Because there are ramifications to that.

There are things, decisions that we have to begin to make.

If I'm going to truly know the person of Jesus Christ, then I'm going to have to spend some time and effort and shift.

There are going to be paradigm changes in my life and all of that.

It's easy to say, man, I know, I love Jesus.

Jesus is great, man.

Jesus saved us, and I love Jesus, and I'm glad I'm going to heaven, and thank you for that.

And I have these times that I can go and pray, but listen to what Paul says.

I consider everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

Because of him, I have suffered the loss of all things and consider them filth, so that I may gain Christ and be found in him.

Not having a righteousness of my own from the law, what he talked about before, I can't earn my salvation.

There's nothing I can do that.

But one that is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.

Now listen what he says.

Because he has established this, this surpassing value of knowing Christ, he says, my goal is to know Jesus and the power of his resurrection.

Okay, that right there is awesome.

We want to live in resurrection power, don't we?

I mean, Jesus raised people from the dead.

I don't think as the church, as people, a lot of times we have enough of a grasp of what it means to live in resurrection power.

Jesus conquered death and sin.

You talk about changing life.

You're talking about uh impacting your prayer life.

You're talking about wanting to share Jesus with people and see people saved.

When you believe in resurrection power and you live in resurrection power, man, we get that.

I want all of that I can get.

Man, I want some of that power to walk through this life where Jesus conquered death and sin.

Look at what he says next.

My goal is to know him and the fellowship of his sufferings.

Okay, now where's the surpassing value in that?

That doesn't excite me the way resurrection power does, right?

I mean, he says the fellowship of suffering is being conformed to his death.

He says, listen, Jesus suffered by being our Savior.

Everything that he did walking through this life was to walk through these times of difficulty and suffering.

And Paul says, there is such value in knowing the person of Jesus that I literally want to know and experience with him.

I want a fellowship with him in his sufferings.

Being conformed with death.

Assuming that I will somehow reach the resurrection from among the dead.

Knowing, Paul, knowing when I died, it is Jesus' resurrection power that's going to save me from the dead.

I mean, it's incredible to think about this.

My goal is to know the fellowship of his sufferings.

Is that a goal that we have in life?

Am I excited about that?

Am I like, wow, let's go learn some more about suffering?

I didn't hear an amen right there.

You know.

But here's what I think Paul is actually trying to say.

It's not like Giddy excited about all that.

What he's saying is, when I know Jesus, and when I get to know Jesus, I want to know everything about Jesus because the life that I have comes from Jesus.

The power in my life, any of it that I have, none of it is my own.

And it all comes through Jesus.

And so as Jesus went through suffering, I know I'm going to go through suffering.

And knowing Jesus and how he handled that, and the victory of that, and the strength of that, and his purpose in all of that, all of a sudden, I now begin to understand my sufferings in a new light.

I understand what I'm going through, and I understand when I understand Jesus, how he approached those sufferings, and how he walked through that and his grace and his strength in that, and through that, was raised from the dead, conquering death and sin.

I want to know that in my life as well.

I want to appropriate that knowledge of Jesus.

I want to surrender myself to him and make it my goal to know him and to know what it means when I'm suffering to know how Jesus' suffering impacts and carries me through these moments.

We all go through times of suffering.

Now, there's a particular type of suffering that's going on here.

Look what he says: the fellowship of his sufferings.

Now, there's a lot of reasons that life can be difficult, right?

And there's just a lot of reasons.

I had the my family, we passed around a stomach flu a weekend or so ago.

Now that's suffering, let me tell you.

It is miserable, right?

It is terrible.

And uh, but that's not the kind of suffering that we're talking about here.

There is suffering that happens because I made a bad mistake in life and I created this journey, and it's now the fruit of my mistakes or failures or whatever, and I've got to walk through this.

That's not the suffering we're talking about in this passage of scripture.

Now, there are scriptures that address that and help us know how to handle just sufferings because life is hard.

And there are passages of scripture and sermons and teachings and biblical wisdom on how to walk through this mess that I created when I repent and allow God to fix and use me and shake me and walk me through this.

This is for the type of sufferings that come from the life of Jesus.

Let me break down just a couple of these words for you.

When you see a sentence like this, this is why it's good to have a notebook like the ones that many of you bought for Philippians, and you have those pages and you write on those things.

When you see a sentence like this, this is the kind that you circle, that you highlight.

This is the type that you brew when we talk about brewing scripture here.

We talked about that a couple weeks ago at our businessman's luncheon.

You believe that God has something to say to you.

You read and repeat that verse over and over and over again.

You slow down and you pay attention to each word, and then you write down what God speaks to you from that.

Think about this verse here in verse 10.

My goal.

What is a goal?

This is what I want so desperately that I'm shaping my life in pursuit of that accomplishment.

And then he says, My goal is to know him.

The word know there is an intimate word.

It means to intimately know him.

It means that when Jesus speaks, I hear his voice and I recognize his voice from amongst all the noise.

It means that when Jesus speaks to me, I know his heart.

I don't misunderstand what he's telling me.

I know him well enough to almost know what he's gonna say to me before he says it, because I know his heart and he's shaping me to have his mind, and I'm understanding him.

I know him.

I know him.

When we get to Christmas time, just a kind of a program note for you, one of the studies, as I've been walking through this study of the book of Philippians, is this idea of knowing Jesus deeply.

If you remember the theme for this book is that live worthy of the gospel.

As we've walked through that, just God's laid it on my heart, man, we need to know Jesus.

All of us do, deeply.

I mean, in a more intimate way.

So starting in Christmas, we're going to study as a church family the life of Jesus from his birth at Christmas time through Easter, his death, burial, and resurrection at Easter time.

And so we're going to study from December through into Easter.

We're going to walk through the life of Jesus together as we walk through that.

Why?

Because how else are we going to know him other than to do that?

The word fellowship is an incredible word here.

The fellowship, that means a shared experience as a partner, a partnership in this.

We are going through this together.

And so what Paul says is as I get to know Jesus and as I understand him and as I move past the cool thing about, you know, raising the dead and making the lame to walk and the blind to see, and yay, heaven, and you know, the throne and revelation and all that, I begin to look at all these other things like Lazarus' death and the failure of his friends at Gethsemane and all this other kind of stuff that he went through.

And so I've got to learn and understand how Jesus went through that and what Jesus was doing in the midst of that, and why did Jesus go through that suffering?

So that he could give me an understanding of how we live in victory through those moments.

Paul says, I want to intimately understand Jesus in those moments of suffering and experience that with him because I know I'm going to experience that as his follower, and I need to understand what Jesus is doing and his power and his love and his grace in that moment.

And I need to be able to feel Jesus in that moment with me.

He says, I want to know intimately as a partner sharing in suffering, his suffering.

Well, what are his suffering?

I want to take a few minutes and just give you some notes on some thoughts I've had this week as I've been praying through this.

There are several different ways that Jesus suffered in this process.

I want to remind you in chapter 2 what the Bible tells us.

Look, flip back over to verse 5 of chapter 2.

He says, Make your own attitude that of Christ Jesus.

In other words, know Jesus, have the same mind that Jesus is, know him intimately, understand.

And here's what he says: who existing in the form of God did not consider it equality with God as something to be used for his own advantage.

In other words, he knew he was God.

But that position, that position didn't matter to him because of his purpose for us.

Instead, he emptied himself.

He assumed the form of a slave, taking on the likeness of men.

Can you imagine what it means for the creator God of the universe, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, just to squeeze himself into human form, to limit himself to pain, to words, to walking where he goes.

All of those kinds of things.

He humbled himself into this experience as a human, and it's more than just into the body of a man.

It is experiencing, limiting himself into the human experience.

What happens when a friend dies?

Or his father, earthly father Joseph, dies, or someone fails him, or he stubs his toe, or he wants, he's trying to communicate to a crowd, and he's trying to preach to them, and they're not listening, and they're not understanding, and they're confused, and he's dealing with words and people's words and understanding.

And he's trying to work through this human experience to get us to understand who he is.

And he's limited himself, he's humbled himself to this point.

He says he humbled himself by being obedient to the point of death, even to death on the cross.

The sufferings of Jesus that come in his life because he stepped out of heaven and became a man so that he could die in our place.

Again, the gospel, live worthy of the gospel.

All of us are sinners by birth, by nature, and by choice.

The Bible says, for all have sinned and come short of God's glory.

All of us have sinned and done wrong.

And Jesus understood that his holiness and his judgment must happen and a price must be paid for that sin.

For the wages of sin is death.

But why did Jesus humble himself and step out of heaven and take on the form of a man and all that?

Because a man must die for man's sins.

I will die at some point physically.

And without someone paying the price for my sins, I would also spend an eternity in judgment for my sin.

And Jesus looked down out of heaven.

He said, I'm just not happy with that.

These are, these are, this is my creation, and I love them, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son.

So Jesus stepped out of heaven and went through this experience described in chapter 2.

He became a man, he lived a sinless life, he went through all this temptation, he faced all the sufferings and all the failures and all the struggles that we face.

And he did it without ever sinning.

And then he voluntarily went to the cross and died a death that no judgment was attached to.

So when he rose again, conquering death and sin, you now have a death that can be a substitute for someone else's.

You have the price paid for sin that can be attributed to someone else.

And when you come and you give your life to Christ, when you make him your Savior, as Paul says here in this passage, when you have a righteousness that is attained only through the work of Christ, it is only obtained through faith in Jesus Christ and his sacrifice.

I take my life and my sin and I give it all to Jesus, and he pays the price for my sin on the cross, and there that punishment is paid.

And then in a spiritual exchange, he gives me his righteousness.

It's not mine, it's his.

And when God looks down out of heaven because of that exchange, he sees me through the shed blood of Jesus and the righteousness of Christ.

And the righteousness that I have comes only through Jesus Christ.

It is only through faith in him.

It is what he did on the cross.

That's what that looks like.

That's what salvation is.

He did that for me.

And I should be driven, as Paul said, to have it the goal of my life to know him intimately and fellowship in all those moments.

So what does his suffering look like as it's in this life of ministry he gave his life to have and to be and to accomplish?

Well, think about just a few of these.

First, his suffering was a love and total commitment to the Lord.

He gave his entire human experience to nothing but following God and modeling him to the world around him.

There's a great story where Jesus is a young boy in his family has gone to Passover in Jerusalem, and they leave and they get out and they're gone a couple of days away, and they start looking around, and Joseph says, Hey, where's Jesus?

And Mary goes, Well, no, I thought he was with you.

And Joseph says, No, I thought he was with you.

And she said, Well, no, you were supposed to, and this happens in every married life, right?

It's Joseph's fault.

He left Jesus somewhere, right?

So they have to go back and get Jesus, and they look around and they're panicked and they've lost the Son of God.

What are we going to do?

And they go to the temple and they find him there.

And he's like, Why are y'all so freaked out?

Didn't you know I would be here about my father's business?

He spent his life serving the gospel, going to the cross to buy for the price for our sins.

You think about all the things that Jesus could have done in his life.

I mean, he's the Son of God.

He's entitled to do whatever he wants to do.

You think about all the different ways that Jesus could have decided, well, if I'm an earthly king, then that gives me a lot more power to spread the gospel.

Or maybe if I'm a tax collector and I can make lots of money and I can help do that and I can serve people that way.

You think about all the different things that Jesus could have done, all the different ways he could have made decisions.

And yet Jesus, the Bible says, humbled himself and he submitted himself to the sole purpose of God, and that was headed to the cross to die on the cross for our sins.

You think about the fact that he has to embody what the first commitment looks like.

When they ask Jesus, what's the greatest commitment?

To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

He has to embody that.

He has to show us what that looks like.

He cannot make the choice to go do this and spend his time with his friends and go spend time doing this and go spend time building this career and go spend time doing this.

He can't figure out I could do it this way better.

If I do it my way, I could do it better.

Jesus couldn't do all of that.

His entire love and focus of God and commitment meant that there were all these things in human experience he did not do, and in his humanness, he gave up all of that for us.

If you think I'm stretching a point, again, Paul says, look, I consider everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ.

You think about all the things that we do that are not adding to our knowledge of who Jesus is.

And you think about all the choices that we make and all the things we give up Jesus so we can do this, and so we can do that.

There is a loss, there is a change in life, there is a different trajectory that we have when we make a total commitment to surrender our lives to serving the Lord.

Paul said to know him.

Number two, loss.

You think about this.

Loss.

What is loss like?

It's different for a believer.

It's different for a believer.

The Bible says we do not mourn as those who have no hope.

That is true.

Man, we know that our loved ones are in heaven.

We know that they are there and heaven is real, but we also understand when my dad passed away, suddenly we're sitting around.

At Thanksgiving table, and I call my kids together and I said, Look, we need to model what it looks like to believe in heaven.

We have to do this differently.

We hurt, we process, we heal differently because of our walk with Christ.

Listen, we even love differently.

When they asked Jesus what the number one commandment was, he said, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And then he said, and the second one is likened to it.

I mean, he didn't waste time, he made the connection.

He said, Listen, if you're going to love God and that love goes to you, and that love comes back down to him, then that love's got to go out to other people around you.

And so the second commandment is just like the first one.

Love one another as I've loved you.

You see, we love differently as believers.

We love with the love of Jesus, which means we love sacrificially.

We love as servants.

We care about people more.

And when we lose them, the world can drown their hurt.

They can find other ways to do that.

They can allow themselves to be sidetracked.

They can get mad at God and blame him for things and all of that.

We cannot do that.

We do not have that freedom.

When we face loss, we must face loss, chained to the cross, and we must do it the way Jesus did it.

Jesus faced loss.

At some point in his life, he lost Joseph, his earthly father.

He lost his cousin in John the Baptist, who was martyred by an evil king in an offensive, degrading manner.

Jesus faced loss.

Think about this.

Jesus lost a good friend and a man named Lazarus.

You know this story.

What is the shortest verse in the Bible?

We know this story.

It's the old question: why did Jesus weep?

Jesus wept because he walks up to the crowd, and yes, there's emotion because he lost his friend, but if you read the passage, he turns and he says, Where is Lazarus?

Hoping that the people that say they love him will recognize salvation through Jesus.

The ones that have claimed to follow him as the Messiah, they will have an answer that comes from a person of faith, and yet they say, Well, he's dead in the grave.

And Jesus weeps.

Jesus doesn't just weep because of Lazarus has passed away.

He knows where Lazarus is.

He is weeping because his friends don't understand what's going on.

They don't understand the reality of heaven.

They don't understand how we approach these matters.

And when Jesus goes through that, he does not have the freedom to rage and complain and drown his sorrows and get mad at God and get hijacked and not heal and all of that.

Jesus understands the gospel demands that I illustrate the power of the resurrection.

How is there power in the resurrection if there's no death?

And he wants us to understand I've got to approach this loss, his suffering.

There's another way that he suffers.

Clearly, Jesus was persecuted.

That's why he ended up in the cross.

That is a part of this suffering.

And Paul says very clearly that he has lost because of his being in prison for the gospel.

Paul was persecuted all kinds of ways.

But Jesus tells us as his followers, we're going to be persecuted as well.

We are living in a world now where we are beginning to understand this, but listen, we have had brothers and sisters in Christ and Iran and Iraq and Saudi Arabia and in Europe and in nations and Africa and everywhere else where they have been suffering directly from persecution.

And it's easy to live in America and not think about persecution.

Now we're beginning to get persecuted.

Now we hear that abortion is more of a fundamental right than even our ability to choose to follow Christ.

One of the Beatitudes addresses directly persecution and how that suffering will happen for us.

In fact, he says, Blessed are you when you are persecuted and when you suffer for my name's sake.

He warned his followers listen, when you are persecuted, understand, I'm the teacher, you're just the student.

If they're going to persecute me, why are they going to be afraid to persecute you?

He says in the Sermon on the Mount, those who are persecuted for righteousness are blessed, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

Next verse, number, verse 11.

You are blessed when they insult and persecute you and falsely say every kind of evil against you because of me.

Verse 12, be glad and rejoice, because your reward is great in heaven, for that is how they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

And Paul says, Listen, I am preaching the gospel, and it is okay that I am in prison.

It is okay that I have been stoned.

Jesus hung on a cross and died for the gospel.

We're afraid to tell our neighbor about Jesus because we might get rejected.

Because we don't understand that we must understand the sufferings of Jesus and understand the joy, the Bible says in Hebrews, for the for the joy set before him he endured the Christ, the cross.

The rejoicing that happens in heaven when one is saved, it comes from an understanding of Jesus' love so much that he endured everything he went on the cross for the victory of saving people for eternity.

And if we don't understand the joy and that suffering, if we don't understand why Jesus went to the cross, if we don't understand the importance of it, we're not going to understand Paul's message.

But Paul says, listen, it's okay I'm in prison.

In chapter one, he talks about, hey man, it's cool because all the guard, Roman Guard knows about Jesus, and all these other people are emboldened about preaching Jesus, and even people who are doing it for the wrong motive are preaching Jesus, and all that's happening because I'm in prison.

Praise God.

Because he understands when he knows Jesus and he has a sense of fellowship with Jesus in those moments, he understands how to walk through that moment.

We also, Jesus suffered because people around him failed him.

Those who should have understood and cared about him did not.

You think about in the Garden of Gethsemane as an example.

Jesus goes to pray and he's facing this incredible physical battle of being beaten and dying on the cross, and an even greater eternal spiritual battle of having to take on that sin and take on the wrath and punishment of God for that.

And here he goes, and he gets his best friends and he says, I need you guys to sit right here and pray with me.

I need you to pray for me as I go over here and pray.

And he's counting on his closest followers to pray him through this moment.

And he goes over here to pray, and he comes back to check on them, and they're asleep.

They've failed him.

The guys who should love him have failed him.

And Jesus went through that.

And yet, as Jesus hung on the cross, he said, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

Jesus died for the man who drove the nails and his wrists and his feet.

Jesus died for the man who whipped him with the cat of ninetails.

Jesus died for the one that hung the sarcastic, ugly, demeaning sign on the top of the cross.

Jesus died for Herod.

He died for the Pharisees.

He died for the ones who fell asleep on him in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Jesus died for Peter, who denied him three times.

Who he knew he was going to use, and yet Peter denied him and he died for him.

And we go through these experiences where we are failed by people who should love us, people who fail us around us.

And we have to understand it is not my job to not forgive.

It is not my I do not have the freedom for revenge.

I do not have the freedom to gossip.

I do not have the freedom to challenge those things.

I must know how Jesus went through that difficulty so that I can emulate Jesus in this moment.

And live out the picture of Jesus.

Temptation.

We go through spiritual temptation.

Jesus began his ministry being tempted by Satan.

And you know that that's not the only time that Jesus was tempted.

You gotta believe in that Garden of Gethsemane he was tempted.

Father.

The prayer goes like this.

If there's any other way, let this cup pass from me.

You know there's temptation in the human part of him, knowing the physical pain of that.

You know in the spiritual part of who he is, who would know the ugliness of our sin more than holy Jesus, who was about to take it to the cross.

And he has got to take himself and become that sin to pay the price for it.

You gotta know he's tempted when he walks back there, and his buddies who have failed him, who ought to know better, are asleep while he's going through this journey, and he can't count on them to pray with him.

You know he's tempted to say, You idiots, what are you doing?

And to rip into him, but he does not.

There's a reason his suffering is important to understand.

The Bible says in Hebrews chapter 2, therefore he had to be like his brothers, like us in every way, so that he could become the merciful and faithful high priest in service to God to make payment for the sins of his people.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

See that word?

So he is able to keep those who are tested.

That's us.

I need to understand Jesus suffering in that moment.

I need to be in that experience so I can learn his heart.

Jesus, this is hard.

Greg, I know it's hard.

Jesus, they failed me.

Greg, they failed me too, son.

But it's okay.

They're learning, they're growing.

Greg, I'm gonna use this moment in Peter's life when he denies me three times.

You watch, if you'll hang in with me, Greg, I'm gonna take Peter and I'm gonna turn him into a champion for the gospel.

I'm going to use that failure as a classroom, but I cannot do that unless I love him through that moment.

Greg, can you love them through that moment?

You see, we've got to understand his sufferings.

And Paul says, listen, the surpassing value of knowing Jesus.

I am in prison, Paul says.

I know better than anybody what this is.

But because I am getting an inkling of Jesus, and because I am pursuing him with all that I have, and because I am trying to get to know how much he loves me, and because I am learning about his sufferings, I am understanding the value in this.

I am willing to go through this suffering.

Jesus was willing on the cross because people would get saved.

And here I am.

I am willing to go through this so that these Roman guards can be saved.

I am willing to go through this so that the church will face persecution, will understand the power of the resurrection, and they'll go out and share based on my testimony.

And so I am willing to do this because I saw Jesus willing to do it.

I am willing to do this because I know how the Father carried him through this moment.

I am willing to do this because I'm seeing Jesus, who sees down the corner of time, and he sees past the cross to the empty tomb, and he sees to the book of Revelation, and he sees to every person who is there who is going to seal forever.

He sees them there.

He looks beyond the difficulty and it gives him a power to live through it.

And Paul says, I want to know Jesus and understand this suffering so I can have the victory and the power of the resurrection coming through it.

So how do we do that?

Paul says very clearly by knowing Jesus.

Make knowing the person of Jesus the main goal of your life.

Everything else doesn't count.

It's incredible.

Man, I got I got fishing buddies.

I'll call and ask them, hey, what color worm do I use right now in the fall?

I mean, you go, you go to Bass Pro Shop, which is sort of like what heaven's gonna look like.

There's gonna be a section there.

Man, you go in there, and there's every color that you can possibly imagine, and some I never saw before.

How am I supposed to know all that?

Well, Greg, you know you got the water temperature and you got the colors of the fall, and you got the color of the water in this time, you've got to change your line to this color, and you've got to use this color, and you gotta hook it this way, and you've got to hook it this way.

In fact, I'll have three different guys.

One of them will tell me you do the wacky deal and you hook it through the middle and does it like that, and some of them you run it through and do it this way, and some of them you put the lead on it, and some of them you don't, some of you don't put any weight, you pull across the top, and you gotta how those guys know all that because they spent time.

We were driving around in Nashville before we moved here, and we got hit by a deer.

Big old deer jumped out on the interstate and hit my wife.

The deer was probably going 40 miles an hour, and she was probably going 87.

I'm probably gonna pay for that one.

That's the suffering when you make a mistake I talked about earlier.

Deer.

First thing somebody said, man, how that deer hit y'all, is it because you people in Tennessee are terrible deer hunters.

There aren't enough deer left in Arkansas to hit somebody on the road because we know how to hunt deer in Arkansas.

Right?

And in Oklahoma, too.

You guys are in that too.

You guys know what you're doing too.

And so here's what happens.

We know all that.

How do you know all that?

Because you spend time doing that.

You take your kids and your grandkids out there and you buy them their first little pop gun with a cork deal and you put them in their camo and you do all that.

I went and bought a camo hat for my less than one-year-old grandson at Bass Pro Shop.

Isn't that awesome?

Boy, we train him up from the beginning.

We know all of that.

Man, I'm watching the World Series, and guys know the stats, and we know all that.

It's fun on a Saturday listening to the people unpack the Razorback game, and you know so many stats, and why this guy wasn't pulling, and what's wrong with the secondary, and what Caitlin Green didn't do this and that kind of a deal.

You know, all that kind of stuff.

We know all these details in life.

We spend all this time digging to all these details.

The most important detail that you will ever know is to intimately know the person and heart of Jesus.

And do we spend that kind of time digging into the person of Jesus?

You've got to have a plan to do that.

You've got to know how and you gotta know what.

I'm gonna remind you about the triangle, not gonna get into all that.

That's my plan.

I try to use in my life.

It just helps me understand the chemistry of how we go.

My identity and who I am in Christ, I'm a blood-bought son of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.

I have surrendered my life to him and it's not mine anymore.

It is his.

If my identity is the person of Jesus that I'm being transformed into, then I've got to spend a whole lot more time learning who Jesus is so I learn what he's transforming me into.

I've got to build a relationship with him.

That's Bible study, prayer, and choices of faith.

That means I'm spending daily time in the Word.

I'm digging through it.

I'm not just getting in open windows.

Now, listen, I love open windows, it's fine.

Get a devotional guy, that's not what I'm talking about.

But if you spend more time in open windows in your guide instead of not in the Word of God, and you're circling these words and you're highlighting these things, and you're listening, and you're being arrested by statements like, it is my goal to know the fellowship of his sufferings, then you're not digging enough.

I am not a good enough preacher to feed you for seven days.

I'm just trying to keep it down to 35 minutes, and I'm not even good at that.

You have got to feed yourself.

You have got to be focused and spend time, you've got to have a plan, ministry, you've got to serve other people.

That whole point at first about the suffering of Jesus, that he committed himself to only one way to do this ministry and only God's way and only that life.

And you've got to think about all the things that Jesus could have done.

You think about how talented Jesus was.

He had to be gifted.

All the different ways he could have built a church, but he was committed to only do what God set before him to do.

He said that repeatedly throughout his ministry.

And so I've got to serve.

I've got to take my life and shave that out, and I've got to serve somebody.

I've got to meet their needs.

I've got to get involved in somebody's life.

I've got to set aside some of the stuff I'm doing, and I've got to be in a spot, and it hurts to give that up, and it hurts to not do that, and it hurts to set aside that vision for something else I can do.

The sufferings of Jesus.

To know what it means to be limited to a singular purpose and focus in life.

And then here's the final question.

This plan of how you pursue Jesus.

Verse 3, we are the circumcision, the ones who serve by the Spirit of God, boast in Christ Jesus, and do not put confidence in the flesh.

Verse 7, everything that was a gain to me, I have considered to be a loss because of Christ.

Verse 8, more than that, I also consider everything, not just the things he gained and sacrificed.

I consider everything to be a loss.

Everything that he could have had, everything that he could have done, every way that he could have approached it.

I consider everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.

Because of him, I have suffered the loss of all things.

And Paul says, I'm not bitter.

I consider a gain so that I may gain Christ.

What changes?

And I put in there a choice of faith.

When you set aside something to pursue Jesus, it's a choice of faith.

It's a sacrifice, it's giving something up.

It is counting something as loss because it is getting in the way of the depth of my knowledge of Jesus and going to another level with him.

What changes are you making specifically to reach this goal of knowing Jesus, the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings?

I want you to bow your heads for a moment as we close.

I'm going to ask you, just you and the Holy Spirit right now, when's the last time you gave up something?

When's the last time you gave up something for Jesus?

It could be anything.

An emotional investment?

It could be your tithe.

You're giving enough to feel good about what you do, but you know you're supposed to tithe.

It could be that person that God told you to share Jesus with, and you're just afraid to share because of the potential ramifications.

And because we don't understand the suffering that Jesus went through and how he endured the cross for the joy set before him, we we don't yet know how to proceed into that moment.

Maybe it's some commitment that you're shying away from because you're afraid of how much you'll not do in your personal life because you got to do that at church or whatever.

I want to ask you, what's the change?

I know change is hard, and I have them in my life.

I'm not trying to make you feel guilty.

This is about process.

This is about understanding.

And I want to give you a promise as we close.

If you will pursue and begin to make those changes, knowing Jesus means the strength of his sufferings, the victory as he walks through that, he will share with you in your life.

So I want to encourage you this morning.

If you've never been saved, in a moment I'm going to pray, God's people are going to stand and sing in testimony, and I want you to give up your life and give it to Jesus because he gave his life for yours.

If you're already saved, whatever the Holy Spirit is talking to you about, I want you to give up whatever it is he's talking to you about.

In everybody's life that's different.

I don't presume to know what all those things are, but the Holy Spirit will guide you if you account for loss, for the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus.

Lord, we love you and we thank you so much.

There's so much of who you are that we have only just begun to know.

I pray, Father, that in this time you'll stir the heart of our people, my heart, to with a desire to know you more that looks like what Paul's describing.

Lord, I pray as people in our church go through difficult times.

Lord, I pray that their knowing you and their desire to know you means that you can step into their life and fellowship them through those times and show them your victory.

And I pray you'll bless them with a sense of your presence.

And I pray this morning you'll give us a freedom to respond to you.

It is in your name that we pray, and all God's people said.

We pray this message has been a blessing to you and helped to strengthen your walk with Jesus.

Please know we want to minister to you and pray for you.

Send an email to contact us at fsfbc.org and let us pray for you and help you in any way we can.

Thank you for listening to Chapter and First, the Bible Teaching Ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church.